Narcotics Anonymous Research Paper

Narcotics Anonymous paper
Brief History Narcotics anonymous (NA) emerged in relation to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program in the 1940s and first emerged in Los Angeles, California in the early 1950s. Similar to AA, NA began as a small US organization but within some years grew into an international organization. It is now considered to be the world’s oldest and largest narcotics organization of its kind. In the beginning, the program grew similar to AA in that it took a few years for it to spread across the country. It began in Los Angeles, California and spread into other large cities like North American cities and Australia around the early 1970s. NA then began to become international and the organization spread to Brazil, Germany,

In 1983, NA created its first textbook which also enhanced the rapid growth so much so that at the end of the year, the organization has spread to over a dozen countries attaining 2, 966 meetings worldwide. Today, NA is considered to be a well-established international organization that is multilingual, and a multicultural fellowship that attains more than 63,000 weekly meetings in 132 countries (“Information about NA”, 2014). The NA program attains a white booklet that describes the program’s anonymous way. The white booklet explains to members that all drug addicts, regardless of certain types of drugs or a combination of drugs, is accepted in this program. They adapt to the AA’s first step of the disease model but other than using the world alcohol they replace it with addiction. NA focuses on the recovery process with a healthy peer support network and the program relishes in the fact that addicts

The group members are asked to not discuss such activities held within meetings outside of meetings in order to protect the privacy of the group. There are no membership fees or dues but since it does cost money to rent out the space often time, the members contribute to keep the rented space their own, however; nonmembers are asked to not contribute their funds to such cause. Typical meetings are either considered a discussion meeting or a speaker